Illusionary
by skyspireskit3
Summary: “It’s not necrophilia if we’re both dead.” Batman/Joker.


For Saji/Mukanshin, whose dream this is based on. Thanks, Saji, wherever you are.

Disclaimer: Not mine.

* * *

Curtains  
rose-velvet red, musty with the dust of corpses  
gently stirring with the screams  
that echo from the crypt hollow behind them.  
Velvet in his hand, about to tear it aside  
the screaming erupts out, a hurricane gale that buffets him back  
the curtains lash and tighten around him, smothering like  
a life-giving womb turned deathtrap

and he snaps awake, his bones left rattling in shock  
like talismans to ward off  
any hope of sleep.  
Ghosts now restless beneath his skin,  
nothing to do but  
slip the mask on again  
and return to the hunt.

Even now, there are still  
places in his mind  
where he doesn't dare to venture. Places he thought he'd excavated  
long ago, driven out the bestial reflections  
lurking there.  
Seems he was wrong.

The night is strung with  
piano wire tension,  
cowering back where it once melded with him.  
The city is a crooked labyrinth, sagging with nightmares  
the path through it, once clear,  
lit with the flanklights of allies  
who've now faded  
back into the dark. Once-familiar names  
are only empty whines of static in his head.

All that remains  
is the Joker.

But even the Joker, faithful as the slitted moon,  
now always seems  
out of reach.  
A faint white abstract like a flashlight of distress  
taunting, teasing,  
from random doorways and lightning strobes, then  
gone, dissolved from sight  
like ink into spongy shadow.

Chases blend together, memories become things  
remembered from unslept dreams  
and a fear he can't explain  
is clotting in his veins.  
He wonders  
if it's too late, if  
all he's chasing is a specter  
and the Joker has already joined those  
who call to him from the behind the curtain.

On and on he runs. He senses he's fleeing  
as much as chasing, though from what  
he doesn't know.  
He only knows that he must find the Joker,  
must find him  
before it's too late,  
even though it always is.

Finally  
it stops.

Batman stands in the sudden pause  
staring up from the base  
of a spiral staircase. Its corkscrew path winds upward into nowhere.  
Batman thinks he remembers this place.  
Facsimile gothic grandeur once made for a stillborn film, rooms of slaughterhouse floors where the dogs are fed.  
The Joker's favorite hideout.  
He makes his way up.

The room is silent  
like a circus deserted, hot acid lights slain, the hectic pulse of its life shut down  
into a state emptier than death.  
What awaits here inside the walls?  
The floorboards creak as he steps in.  
The Joker stands in the center of the room  
waiting for him.

Batman moves with caution.  
Is this the end of some game  
or the start of something worse?  
The Joker glides backwards over the stain-eaten floor  
beckoning, tempting  
but something is wrong.  
The clown is moving awkwardly,  
limbs twitching as if guided by wires, head cocked at a broken angle.  
Batman reaches out to touch his lover's cheek  
finds it cold as wax through his glove.

The Joker crumples then, falling to the floor like a string-slashed  
marionette.  
Batman is frozen. What's before his eyes won't crystallize  
into understanding:  
the sinewy, pale body he knows so well  
sprawled at his feet,  
chopped and quartered like butcher's mutton.  
The pieces strung together with knots of intestine and ribbon.  
The head hanging on only  
by a few gummy threads.  
Glassed, staring eyes dull as wasted tears.

Slow as a stone through oil, Batman sinks to his knees  
taking the corpse in his arms  
like a dark god accepting sacrifice.  
His mind is perched somewhere on the arm of a stopped clock.  
The severed thighs. The hacked torso. The suppurating mouth.  
He can't connect them as the same ones  
he's imprinted every texture of on his knuckles and lips.

Blood.  
Without thinking, he tastes it  
putting his mouth to the open wound of the neck, tongue strumming its last few threads  
in his desperation  
searching for the heat of their battle, their fire  
that he had always feared would incinerate them  
both alive.

But there's nothing.

The body in his arms is cold  
as winter-frosted glass,  
as eternity alone.  
He holds it even though  
his armor gives no warmth.  
His eyes, fevered with rage, rip apart the blackness  
searching for the one responsible.  
But there's no one there.

Blood  
bitter and choking as guilt  
creeping around him, beneath his armor, branded into his skin  
dried to rust on his gloves.

How long has it been there?

How long?

In the dimness, his mind conjures  
a montage of sneering faces, other fiends risen from the city's spate of madness, anyone else who could have done this.  
One last stand against  
the terrible truth  
closing over him like the lid of a tomb.

How long

has the blood been on his gloves?

Around him  
the primordial darkness –  
what he'd thought was the sword at his side, never his cancer—  
froths with laughter  
filling the void like the pulse of bats' wings.  
It has two voices.  
One is the Joker's, that familiar shriek  
like razors over heartstrings, braying triumph.  
The other  
something else, but he's heard it  
in his own head often enough.

He has no answer.  
The last whispers of his mind are quietly spooling away.  
The other's flesh, even in death  
feels right against his.  
It doesn't make much difference now, anyway.  
Hands digress over well-worn routes  
through contours of stringy muscle.  
His tongue delves into the hacked neck like a worm  
into rotted fruit,  
congealed blood smooth as wine over his teeth.  
Fingertips catch on  
nubs of bone, open corrugated wounds  
swallowing its ice with his heat,  
as the plague laughter smothers everything.

* * *

So, the implication here is that Batman went nuts and murdered the Joker without knowing it.


End file.
